Solms's Revision of Drive Theory

March 1, 2023. In the commentaries on Mark Solms's “Revision of Drive Theory” (JAPA 69/6) a number of inaccuracies are to be found. It is possible in a letter such as this to reference but a few. I will therefore limit myself to some points made in the first of the two commentaries, that by Alan Sugarman.

Sugarman claims that the Solms model is “reductionistic” for focusing on brain as opposed to mental functioning. In complete agreement with Freud's definition of drive (incorrectly translated by Strachey from trieb as instinct) as the connection between mind and body, Solms adopts a dual-aspect monist perspective and revises (much as Freud himself wished to be able to do at the time) some key features of his metapsychology in function of what is known about the brain today but was not known a century ago. Solms mentions dual-aspect monism in his response to the commentaries, but it should be noted that Freud's own perspective was that of a dual-aspect monist and that Solms is in complete agreement with Freud's view of the mind as “driven by an energy of some kind” (Solms, p. 1036), which Solms defines as the very reason for being of drive—homeostasis and the energic objective of feeling: survival. In so doing, he resituates drives within the frame of necessity, satiation as opposed to pleasure, which leads from the notion of voluntary behavior to that of learning by experience and defines a “subjective aspect of ‘drive‘”: affect (Solms, p. 1052), which could hardly be more related to psychological meaning.

Next Sugarman states that “neuroscience provides only a parallelism that demonstrates the correlation between brain functioning and subjective mental experience” and claims that “no superordinate model of human functioning has yet been discovered that can encompass and integrate the neurological spheres of human experience” (p. 1142). Moreover, he states, citing George S. Klein, that “even if one agrees to define drive as arising from neurobiological sources, it ‘b